


Limbo

by scorpiontales



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Angst, Character Death, Missing Persons
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-03-28
Updated: 2012-03-28
Packaged: 2017-11-02 15:46:12
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 985
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/370664
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scorpiontales/pseuds/scorpiontales
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John Watson has been missing for exactly two days, three hours and forty seven minutes.</p><p>	Sherlock knows. He’s been counting.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Limbo

**Author's Note:**

> TW for angst and loads of it. Beware
> 
> This was based off this Tumblr post
> 
> http://dramatis-echo.tumblr.com/post/19876970379/i-will-find-you-john
> 
>  
> 
> As usual Sherlock is not, or never will be mine.

John Watson has been missing for exactly two days, three hours and forty seven minutes.

                Sherlock knows. He’s been counting.

 

 

                Considering all the kidnapping that went on in the 221B household, John disappearance shouldn’t have been that much of a surprise. Kidnappings were common. Suddenly vanishing into the night was a habit. Disappearing off the face of the earth for a few hours was almost dull.

                However, none of these things ever happened when John went out just to get milk from Tescos. Especially when they didn’t have a case.

                Sherlock reports him missing after one day. He expects to find him by sundown.

                Three days later, sitting across from the start of a makeshift crime board he’s beginning to wonder if he should have reported it sooner.

 

                The yard gets involved on day two.

                It’s a bit heartwarming, the search they put up for John Watson. Any free officer is assigned to the task. Anderson combs for any evidence he can find. Dimmock blows up at his task force when they stall. Sally Donavan stays overtime to help the effort.

                Lestrade, when forced to go home, still keeps up the search anyway.

                There isn’t much to work with. John Watson, 39, vanished somewhere on the way to Tescos and his flat. There is nothing to find. The cameras didn’t catch anything besides him walking up the street before he entered a non-camera area.  No one at Tescos saw or remembered him entering. There were no reports of suspicious activity, nothing at all.

                They still try. Sherlock practically lives at the Yard then, sleeping on desks on the rare occasions he actually sleeps. He blows up at people a few times, no more than a few, giving off deductions about people’s deepest darkest secrets. No one calls him freak at all.

                He only leaves two weeks later when the investigation is pulled to a halt.

Lestrade keeps working anyway.

 

Sherlock asks for Mycroft help after the third week.

The man knows about as much as Sherlock does. He helps anyway.

All they manage to find is a bloody scarf hidden behind a few loose bricks in an alley way to Tescos. Its John’s, Sherlock gave it to him for Christmas. He can tell John was attacked, hurt and exactly what street and time he disappeared at.

He runs with the lead for at least a week before he finds that it is nothing but a dead end. John had lent his scarf to a bleeding homeless man on the way there. The man said John walked off right after.

Sherlock threatens to burn down all of London to find John. The man doesn’t doubt him.

 

 

John Watson has been missing for exactly one month, two days and seventeen minutes. The chances of finding him alive are slim.

The chances of Sherlock admitting it are slimmer.

 

The yard eventually moves it task not to just finding John but to keeping Sherlock alive as he searches for him.

The man doesn’t sleep, doesn’t eat, doesn’t drink unless forced to. Ms. Hudson leaves food at his desk on the hour, not even complaining about not being his housekeeper anymore. Lestrade comes over to actually force the man to bed by hand. Molly arrives to help with forensic evidence and always brings food with, filling the man with nothing but tea and scones.

Despite their best efforts, Sherlock looks skinny, hollow and most of all dead.

They can’t figure out if it’s because of the lack of taking care of himself or the lack of John.

 

 

After two months John Watson is presumed dead.

Sherlock shows no change besides throwing himself into his investigation with more vigor.

That and composing a new violin piece. He refused to let anyone see the title but the music flows onto the streets every night when he hits a wall. It starts slow, the moves to frantic and happy, to a sudden jarring series of chromatic scales that come off as eerier and horrific and at last a slow, lonely sound, filled with intense sadness.

It had no ending as of yet. Forever in limbo.

 

 

Sherlock starts smoking again. Lestrade had started one week after John’s disappearance.

No one is surprised.

It has been two months, two weeks , one day and thirty four minutes.

 

 

Harry drinks herself to death at almost the four month mark. It makes John the last Watson alive, well at least not dead for sure.

Sherlock takes time to attend her funeral. He lays flowers at her grave, is incredibly quiet during the whole sermon and states blankly that John will be upset if no one went.

He doesn’t stay for long. He says it was dull, afterword. He does not say that when he looked at Harry’s grave all he could see was John’s name in her place.

 

Sherlock considers going back to the drugs a few moments at times. To erase the ideas, the frantic thoughts of his brain, the voice in the back of his head taunting him as he stares at his wall filled with photographs of John whispering ‘You’ve failed him.”

                He doesn’t though. Doesn’t want to disappoint the man. Anything but that.

 

                He lost track at what moment the wall became a shrine instead of an evidence board.

                He can’t really make himself care.

 

               

                At six months, one week, 5 days , three hours and 2 minutes, the yard pulls a body out of the Thames. Well, more of a skeleton really. It’s the same build as John, has the same mark of a bone fracture in the right shoulder and has been there for the same time John has been missing. Death appears to be from blunt force trauma.

                At six months, two weeks, one day, seven hours and twenty one minutes, the body is marked of that of John Watson.

                John is no longer in limbo. Sherlock isn’t either.

                He’s in hell.

 

**Author's Note:**

> I'm considering writing sort of AU"s to this, such as one with a somewhat happy ending, and a really funky one. If you would like that let me know.


End file.
